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Monday, February 11, 2013

Stealing History: Transforming the Tudors

The advice is to
write what you know. But how do you do that when you write fantasy? My life
experience with magic and sword play is limited—okay, nonexistent. However,
there are other angles besides the plot to put this advice into practice, such
as the characters. So when I began to imagine the new characters for my epic
fantasy, Kindar’s Cure, I searched my
mind for any knowledge I could apply. What did I know a lot about that could
make my story stronger? The answer was history.

Stealing: I’ve always had a love of history. I
can’t resist picking up new biographies at the library, and the more ancient
the subject the better. I’m not talking reads about Snookie or Barack Obama. I
prefer Churchill or Hadrian or Catherine the Great. My two areas of special
interest have always been Revolutionary America and Tudor England. I’ve read
everything I came across on those subjects.

The
revolutionary era didn’t really fit with my story based in a medieval world,
but the Tudors were a goldmine. They were a royal family with three children,
and Kindar was the middle daughter of a royal family. I needed conflict and
dysfunction, and what’s more messed up than Henry VIII, his six wives and three
kids, Mary, Elizabeth, and Edward? My Kindar is a strong determined woman, who
knows her own mind and wants a throne. One of the strongest queens in history, Elizabeth
the First, Henry’s second daughter, managed to survive her father’s deadly
displeasure to take the throne. I began to model my royal family on those
famous true-life royals.

Transforming: I couldn’t pick up the Tudors and set
them down as is into my fantasy world. That would be a little too obvious. I
took the facts about them and molded them, twisting and shaping until I had a
shadow version of history.

The single biggest
change was to make my world, Anost, a matriarchal kingdom. Henry became an
empress instead of a king. I also turned, his son, Prince Edward, into the bratty
youngest daughter, making my entire royal family female. Obviously, I couldn’t
have one wife, let alone six. I left the wives out and created one banished
husband. Making the relationships inside my royal family every bit as unhappy
as the true life version, my story focused on telling the tale from the
prospective of a Tudor heir.

After all, Henry
VIII declared both his daughters bastards and kept them under house arrest,
with the headman’s axe continually hanging over their heads. What would life
have been like for the disfavored Elizabeth and Mary? Henri divorced or
murdered their mothers. Henry VII was also notorious for his rages and
unpredictable temper, led on by paranoid fears. What better conflict than to
give these same character traits, including the raging hysterics, to my Empress
Eugenie, making sure her royal daughters suffered the same uncertainty and
threat as their historically versions.

Desperate for a
male heir, the War of the Roses just before his father’s reign gave Henry a
horror of an unstable succession. That one great terror drove all his
decisions, including throwing off wife after wife along with his entire
country’s Catholic religion. And as Henry the VIII had a deep abiding reason
for his wife shuffle, my empress needed something to drive her.

What better than
a prophecy of doom and gloom? A prophecy that predicted the advent of three
royal daughters would proceed a time of dark catastrophe and war for Anost. A
dark time that Empress Eugenie was desperate to keep off by whatever means
necessary.

Outside the real sixteenth century Tudor family, the conflicts was every bit as bad. Tensions
couldn’t help but spill over to their court. Whispers of treason were
everywhere. The headsman axe had frequent business among the noblemen and women,
creating an aura of suspicion and terror where people were afraid to look crossways
at each other lest trouble land on them. The Tudor children couldn’t trust
their father, their siblings or the people surrounding them. Mistrust isolated
them. I built the same atmosphere around Kindar, forcing her to start the story
as a hard, cold character, clinging to her rank and herself, unable to speak
her thoughts even to her allies.

The Tudor
atmosphere gave me a great starting conflict, but I needed more. I threw a new
twist into the story. Kindar, like Elizabeth the First, had to rely on her own
wits to survive, but I created Kindar with another strike against her. Kindar
has a disease. Disease in the middle ages was a judgment sent against you by
God. God found you flawed, morally or spiritually, and He marked you in a way
to show the world your faults. It made Kindar even more shunned by her family
and everyone around her.

Then
I added a dose of murder, having the eldest daughter in the Mary role killed. Suspicion
naturally falls on the next daughter in line. A daughter with a sickness that
makes her worthless, but whose desire to rule is well-known. Suddenly, Kindar
is under arrest. A pressure that sends her running to find a cure and the rest
is history, so to speak.

So in what way
have you stolen or transformed history to suit your story needs?

3 comments:

Every ounce of mythology I could get my greedy little paws on. I twisted their stories, beat them down, and had poor Kylie pay the price. History is fantastic - and their stories some of the best out there :)

See, that's what really drew me in to Kindar's Cure, I recognized the historical flavor you used. I love to read about the Tudor Era too. Adding the fantasy elements made it even more fun.

Lately, I've been studying other civilizations not associated with the classical western culture that is the norm in U.S. education. Goldmine. We get so used to a certain way of thinking and behaving that we forget western culture is relatively new and doesn't exemplify the rest of the world. This thinking outside my own cultural parameters has been a huge help in world-building.

I definitely agree with Joyce - for my Afterlife Series I have gobbled up cultural and religious myths regarding death and the afterlife. Diving further into non-Western myths has been really interesting and I love being able to expand beyond my own cultural filters and comfort zone!